GOSLINER & BURKE: FROM PARACHUTES TO PARTNERSHIPS 
23 
and well documented by Japanese artist Kumataro Ito.^ Ito also made a series of drawings of nudi- 
branch mollusks. These drawings were rediscovered by Diane Tyler in 1982, in the Mollusk Divi¬ 
sion library of the National Museum of Natural History. By then, the actual specimens could not 
be located in the collections, but Ito had drawn the figures so well that the species were readily 
identifiable from the pictures he created decades earlier (Gosliner 2006). 
In 1992, the Academy led an expedition to the Mabini/Tingloy area of Batangas Province, in 
southern Luzon Island, just three hours south of Manila. Marine life abounded, and more than half 
of the species found were new to science. Not only was marine life everywhere, but so too were 
unsustainable fishing practices such as using dynamite and cyanide. On one of the first dives, an 
underwater explosion all but blew out Gosliner’s eardrums and left dead and dying fish all around 
him. Fortunately, all the divers were okay, but the incident graphically reinforced that this spectac¬ 
ular place was facing serious environmental challenges. 
This first trip also initiated a long-standing collaboration with the Philippines Bureau of Fish¬ 
eries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) and rekindled the relationship with Edgardo Gomez, director 
of the Marine Science Institute (MSI) at the University of the Philippines (UP). These relationships 
would prove to be pivotal. BFAR is the national agency responsible for the regulation of fisheries 
and the one that issues permits to collect and export marine specimens. UP is the premier univer¬ 
sity of the Philippines and MSI has a great cadre of marine research scientists. These early connec¬ 
tions and collaborations provided the foundations for launching the 2011 expedition. 
Shallow-water marine research, which brought two or three Academy scientists to the Philip¬ 
pines on periodic visits, became an almost annual event after 1992. The scientific partnerships 
expanded in 1997, when three research scientists from BFAR participated in the Academy’s annu¬ 
al Summer Systematics Institute, a program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). 
This helped build systematic and evolutionary biological expertise in the Philippines and contin¬ 
ued to solidify this key partnership. 
A more integrated model for expeditions began to emerge in 2003 during the planning to 
replace the Academy’s structurally challenged, aging facility in Golden Gate Park with a new state- 
of-the art, sustainably designed, visitor-centric building and exliibits. The leadership team, which 
included the authors, articulated several core values for the new exhibits: They would be ground¬ 
ed in the science in which the Academy has unique expertise and experience; would highlight areas 
of high biological diversity around the world; would describe both conservation challenges and 
success stories; and would be designed to attract new and more diverse audiences. 
These precepts led us to plan for a living Philippine coral reef as one of the major exliibits in 
the new aquarium. Marine life in the Pliilippines is among the richest of any habitat in the world. 
Both conservation challenges and success stories abound there. And the San Francisco Bay Area 
has a large Filipino community, self-described as not having a tradition of visiting museums. We 
wanted to create a Philippine reef exhibit that would be a source of pride and interest for the Bay 
Area Filipino community, but we weren’t quite sui*e how to connect with the community or what 
the result might look like. In 2003, the authors received an Infonnal Science Education grant from 
the National Science Foundation: Water is Life: Immersing the Public in Aquatic Diversity (ESI- 
0229918). This gi'ant not only provided critical support to help create the cornerstone exhibits for 
the Steinliart Aquarium in the new California Academy of Sciences, but it also provided opportu¬ 
nities for building Filipino partnerships beyond our greatest expectations. 
In 2004, serendipity brought us a Filipino high school summer intern, Beatrice Romero, whose 
mother, Marie, ran the local Filipino bookstore, which was also a major Filipino social hub in San 
Francisco. We explained our project to Marie Romero and expressed our desire to have members 
of the Filipino community advise us on how to make the reef exhibit more accessible and mean- 
